Jeremy Bryan Jones was convicted in October 2005 of the capital murder of Lisa Marie Nichols, a woman who lived alone in a mobile home in Turnerville, a rural community in north Mobile County, Alabama. She was killed on the evening of September 17, 2004, two days after Hurricane Ivan struck the Mobile area and cut the power to her home. Jones, an Oklahoma native who had been living in Georgia under another man's name, was staying next door with a couple who had once employed him. He was arrested four days later. A jury found him guilty on four counts of capital murder, voted 10 to 2 for death, and on December 1, 2005, Circuit Judge Charles Graddick sentenced him to death.
The Nichols case made him known well beyond Alabama. While he was held in the Mobile County jail, Jones told investigators he had killed at least a dozen other people in several states, among them a couple and two 16-year-old girls in northeastern Oklahoma. He was charged with murder in Georgia, in the death of a 16-year-old neighbor, and in Louisiana, in the death of a New Orleans woman. He then denied most of what he had said. Investigators in Alabama and Kansas searched for remains he had described and found nothing, and no other killing has been proved against him in court. His one conviction is the Nichols murder.
Jones came from Miami, a small city in Ottawa County, in the far northeastern corner of Oklahoma, near the Kansas and Missouri lines. Wire reports during his trial described him as a construction worker. At his sentencing, his mother and stepfather testified about his childhood. According to the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, which summarized the evidence, they described a humble and turbulent home in which his attention deficit disorder went untreated, his parents fought, and his stepfather drank. They also testified about his love for his younger brother, and family members traveled from Oklahoma to attend the trial. The trial court gave this evidence some weight and noted that his family also loved him.
His trouble with the law began early. The Associated Press reported in 2005 that he had faced burglary and theft charges in Missouri in 1992. In March 1997 he pleaded no contest to charges in Ottawa County, Oklahoma; Alabama Public Radio reported during his trial that Alabama law did not allow that out-of-state plea to be used against him, and the trial court kept evidence of it out. The Ottawa County sheriff, Dennis King, said in 2005 that years earlier Jones had worked as an informant for the county's drug task force.
By 2004 he was a fugitive. When he was arrested in Alabama he was wanted in Oklahoma on a rape charge and for failing to register as a sex offender, a matter the Associated Press tied to 1997. One 2005 wire report said he had been wanted in Oklahoma on a sexual assault charge since 2000.
In Georgia and Alabama, Jones went by the name John Paul Chapman. The name belonged to a real man who was then imprisoned in Missouri, according to NPR and the Associated Press. Under that name he moved to Georgia and lived in Douglasville, west of Atlanta, where he worked in construction. He lived in a trailer park there, and Amanda Greenwell, a 16-year-old girl whose death he was later charged with, was his neighbor.
He was arrested three times in Georgia in 2003 and 2004 on minor offenses, in Douglas and Carroll counties, and each time he was booked as John Paul Chapman. One was a trespassing arrest in Carroll County in January 2004; another was a misdemeanor drug arrest in Douglas County in June 2004. Local police sent his fingerprints to the FBI, but the FBI's automated system did not connect them to Jones or to the Oklahoma warrant. NPR reported that on the first Georgia arrest the system created a new record under the alias, and later prints were matched against that record. Each time, he was released.
The error came to light only after the Alabama arrest, when investigators there and in Georgia learned his real name. In May 2005 the FBI acknowledged it. A statement from Thomas E. Bush III, assistant director of the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division, said that law enforcement had lost a chance to prevent further crimes by this man and that the FBI regretted the incident. An FBI spokesman, Joe Parris, told NPR that the technology had limits and that no one had done anything wrong, and the agency said the system worked more than 95 percent of the time. A Georgia Bureau of Investigation official said such errors were very rare.
A deputy chief, Stan Copeland, told NPR that if the system had identified him, Jones would probably have been handed over to Oklahoma rather than released. Relatives of women whose deaths had been linked to him were angry. The husband of Patrice Endres, a Georgia hairdresser who had disappeared in April 2004, said a 95 percent rate was not good enough and hoped the case would lead to reform. Lisa Nichols's former husband said it was a shame but that it could not be taken back. Afterward, NPR reported, authorities began pulling any prints already on file for a person when new prints were taken and checking them against the system for missed warrants.
Hurricane Ivan struck the Mobile area on Wednesday, September 15, 2004. That day, according to the Court of Criminal Appeals, Jones turned up without warning at the home of a couple in Turnerville who had employed him in 1999 and 2000. He was using the name John Paul Chapman. They let him stay in their mobile home while they evacuated.
On Thursday morning he asked the wife for a radio. Searching her closet for it, he found her .25-caliber handgun. The family came home that afternoon. Their neighbor, Lisa Marie Nichols, also came back after the storm. The court's account says Jones asked about her and was told that she was a single woman who lived alone in the mobile home next door.
Lisa Nichols worked at a local grocery store. At the sentencing phase, Assistant Attorney General Corey Maze described her to the jury as a hard-working woman who had raised two children alone and had helped raise two grandchildren. Her two daughters and other relatives attended the court hearings, and one daughter hugged a prosecutor after the verdict. The appeals court gave her age as 43; news reports at the time of the trial gave it as 44, and some earlier reports as 45.
On Friday, September 17, she left for work at about 5 a.m. Her home, like others nearby, had been without power since the storm.
That evening the man of the house next door drove about 30 minutes to a fast-food restaurant in Citronelle to buy hamburgers. While he was gone, the court found, Jones took the handgun and a beer to Lisa Nichols's home. The trial court found that he raped her under threat of violence and shot her. He then went back for gasoline and set a fire inside her home. A neighbor heard what sounded like an explosion between 7 and 8 p.m.
When the neighbor returned with the food, prosecutors said, Jones had showered; he watched hunting videos and went to bed. At about 10 p.m. the homeowner saw him near the gas cans and smelled gasoline on him; Jones said he was fueling the four-wheelers.
Lisa Nichols did not go to work on Saturday and did not answer calls. That night her two daughters and a son-in-law went to her home and found her. Jones stayed behind at the house next door. At trial, prosecutor William Dill said Jones refused to help the daughters and stayed away because he knew it was his doing. The homeowner later testified that Jones asked him what the scene had looked like. On Sunday, Jones left and did not come back.
Mobile County sheriff's deputies arrested Jones on the morning of Tuesday, September 21, 2004. When they told him he was under arrest, he said, according to the appeals court, that he had every intention of making them kill him. He was still using the Chapman name, and it was after this arrest that investigators in Alabama and Georgia learned who he really was.
Speaking to a reporter for WPMI, the NBC affiliate in Mobile, in 2004, Jones denied killing her. He said he did not deny having been at her house and that he was there when she died, but he said she had overdosed on drugs, and he said he did not know how she came to be shot or how the fire started.
Over the next five months Jones gave Paul Burch, an investigator with the Mobile County Sheriff's Office, four statements, each different from the one before. The Court of Criminal Appeals set them out in its 2007 opinion.
In the first, on the day of his arrest, he said that he and Lisa Nichols had used methamphetamine and had consensual sex, that she had chest pains and convulsions and died in the bathroom, and that he later shot her and set a fire. In the second, on November 4, 2004, he admitted using crystal methamphetamine and trying to force her to have sex, and said he shot her and later set the fire. In the third, on January 25, 2005, he admitted raping her but would not discuss it further. In the fourth, on February 9, 2005, he admitted raping and shooting her and setting the fire.
He also made damaging statements to a fire marshal, Gary Cartee, and on December 10, 2004, he telephoned his former employer, the homeowner next door, from the jail. The call was recorded, and the jury heard it at trial. On the tape Jones said he had killed her while high on methamphetamine, higher than he had ever been in his life, and that it had felt like being in a movie. He said he did not know why he had done it. Asked whether prayer would do any good, he said it could not hurt. When the homeowner said he had thought he knew him, Jones replied that he had known him, just not on drugs.
The physical evidence pointed the same way. A firearms examiner matched the bullets to the .25-caliber pistol from the closet next door. A DNA analyst found a stain on Jones's shirt consistent with his DNA and hers. Bud Light cans were found in her home, and he had recently bought gasoline from two neighbors.
While Jones was held without bond in the Mobile jail, investigators from other states came to question him. In December 2004 investigators from Douglas County, Georgia, interviewed him in Mobile, and that same night he was charged with murder in the death of Amanda Greenwell, 16, his neighbor in Douglasville. She had been missing for about a month when her remains were found in April 2004. The Douglas County district attorney, David McDade, said there had been a major break in the case the evening before; authorities did not say what it was. He said he hoped to bring Jones to Georgia quickly but expected Alabama to try him first. Alabama, he said, was first in line, and Georgia was an eager second. Her father attended part of the Alabama trial and later described Jones as a charmer but a harmer. He said that although they had lived in the same trailer park, he did not remember seeing Jones around the time she was killed.
By May 2005 Jones had also been charged with murder in New Orleans, in the death of Katherine Collins, 45, whose body had been found in February 2004.
When Jones was convicted in Alabama in October 2005, the Associated Press reported that the verdict opened the way for possible prosecution in Georgia and New Orleans. In August 2007, when his appeal was decided, the AP still described him as charged in both deaths. No trial in either case has been reported.
A Mobile County grand jury returned a capital murder indictment against Jones in early May 2005. The indictment alleged that Lisa Nichols had been sexually assaulted and shot in her mobile home, which was then set on fire. At his arraignment in Mobile County Circuit Court on May 10, 2005, he pleaded not guilty.
The hearing was brief and loud. As Judge Charles A. Graddick ordered a psychiatric evaluation, Jones called out that he was not crazy. His court-appointed lawyer, Habib Yazdi, tried to cover his mouth, and Jones was taken out of the courtroom for a short time; he said nothing more when he came back. Yazdi told reporters afterward that his client was agitated, excited and scared, and that the lawyers had tried to stop him from saying anything that might hurt his case. Graddick appointed a veteran lawyer, Greg Hughes, to help Yazdi, and Hughes said the defense might change the plea to not guilty by reason of insanity.
At the request of the state attorney general's office, the judge sent Jones from the Mobile Metro Jail to the Taylor Hardin Secure Medical Facility in Tuscaloosa for mental testing, and he also granted the defense a separate evaluation. The Court of Criminal Appeals later held that the state's evaluation was properly ordered because the defense had raised a possible insanity plea.
The trial opened in Mobile County Circuit Court in October 2005, with Graddick presiding, and the jury was sequestered for its several days. The case was prosecuted by the Alabama attorney general's office: Chief Assistant Attorney General Don Valeska, Assistant Attorney General William Dill and Assistant Attorney General Corey Maze. Hughes and Yazdi defended Jones. His mother, his girlfriend and other relatives attended.
In his opening statement Dill said the crime had brought panic, terror and horror to the Nichols family, and that Jones had set the fire to destroy evidence. Hughes told the jury that police had arrested the wrong man. He conceded that Jones's own statements had led to the indictment, but he said Jones was addicted to methamphetamine, had been awake for several days when he was arrested, and had given statement after statement to get out of the harsh conditions of a cell for inmates on suicide watch, telling detectives whatever they wanted to hear.
The jury heard the recorded jail call. Jones testified in his own defense over two days. About three months before trial, after the death in August 2005 of a neighbor of Lisa Nichols, he had changed his account: he now said that neighbor had gone into her home with him and was responsible. Prosecutors challenged that story, and the AP reported that his account did not match their timeline. Dill called it a lie.
In closing, Valeska read from the December 10 jail call and told the jury there was no reasonable doubt. Hughes argued that Jones might have covered up the killing but had not committed capital murder, and repeated that investigators had drawn confessions from him while he was on drugs, in exchange for better treatment such as food, telephone use and release from suicide watch.
On Wednesday, October 26, 2005, after deliberating about two hours, the jury found Jones guilty of four counts of capital murder. Under Alabama law the killing was capital because it was committed during a rape, a sexual abuse, a burglary and a kidnapping, or attempts at them. Jones showed no emotion as the verdicts were read. Lisa Nichols's daughter and other relatives wept. Her daughter said she would always have a place in her heart for the attorney general's office and the sheriff's office. Paul Burch, the investigator, said the verdict was what they had expected from the start.
The penalty phase took one more day. Maze told the jurors that the aggravating circumstances of burglary, kidnapping and rape justified a death sentence, and said Jones had violated her home, her freedom, her body and her soul. Dill told them that if anyone deserved the death penalty, it was Jeremy Jones. Hughes asked for life without parole. He said Jones was mentally ill, had grown up in a chaotic home and still had a spark of humanity in him, and that death was not a proper punishment for someone who was sick.
Two psychologists testified. Daniel Koch, for the defense, said Jones had untreated attention deficit disorder and was prone to fits of rage, and the appeals court recorded that the defense expert also diagnosed schizoaffective disorder and drug abuse. Doug McKeown, for the state, said chronic drug abuse had contributed to his antisocial behavior but that he could tell right from wrong when Lisa Nichols was killed. The court later summarized the state expert's view as voluntary drug use, a self-centered personality and antisocial behavior disorder.
On Thursday, October 27, the jury voted 10 to 2 to recommend death. The judge was not bound by the recommendation. Jones was led from the courtroom wearing a suit and tie. He put his fist over his heart and reached toward his girlfriend.
On December 1, 2005, Graddick sentenced Jones to death by lethal injection. Attorney General Troy King, who urged the death sentence, condemned the crime and said Jones had picked his victim the way a predator does and had never shown remorse. Hughes again asked for life without parole, pointing to extreme mental and emotional problems and long-term drug addiction. The judge called Jones a danger to civilized society. Before the sentence was read, Jones told the court that God would have the final say.
The trial court found no statutory mitigating circumstances, gave the nonstatutory ones little or some weight, and found that the aggravating circumstances outweighed them. It accepted the jury's recommendation. In February 2006 the court denied his motion for a new trial, in which his lawyers argued that the trial should have been moved because of publicity and that his statements had been obtained while he received extra food and telephone privileges in jail.
Death sentences in Alabama are appealed automatically. On August 31, 2007, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the convictions and the death sentence in Jones v. State, in an opinion by Presiding Judge Baschab, with Judges McMillan, Shaw, Wise and Welch concurring. The opinion is reported at 43 So. 3d 1258.
The court rejected each of his claims. On the change of venue, it found neither presumed nor actual prejudice: some coverage had called him a suspected serial killer and mentioned other suspected crimes, but most of it was factual and fairly objective, and jurors who had formed opinions were excused. On his statements, it held that his methamphetamine use, the food and telephone privileges, his antidepressant and Risperdal medication, and his time on suicide watch went to the weight a jury might give the statements, not to whether they could be admitted; it found no evidence that drugs had made the confessions involuntary. It held that the fire marshal's testimony did not require an engineering license, that defense counsel were not ineffective merely for not following the American Bar Association's capital defense guidelines, and that two prospective jurors had been properly removed for cause.
Weighing the case independently, the court found the sentence neither disproportionate nor excessive. It agreed with the trial court that both experts had found some mental or emotional problem, but held that none of those problems had caused him to commit the crimes. Alabama's automatic review meant the case would go on to further courts, and the AP noted at the time that any execution date could be years away.
After the direct appeal, Jones filed a petition for postconviction relief under Rule 32 of the Alabama Rules of Criminal Procedure. It claimed juror misconduct and juror incompetence. According to the petition, as the Alabama Supreme Court described it, interviews after the trial showed that one juror, identified as T.E., had told Judge Graddick during the sequestered trial that he was an alcoholic, that the judge had allowed him to drink during sequestration, and that the judge had not told defense counsel. The petition also alleged that the juror had answered questions in jury selection untruthfully.
Jones asked Graddick to step aside from the postconviction case, arguing that the judge would be a material witness. Graddick refused. On June 15, 2011, the Court of Criminal Appeals, by a majority, ordered him to recuse. The state then asked the Alabama Supreme Court to intervene, and on December 9, 2011, in Ex parte State of Alabama (In re State of Alabama v. Jeremy B. Jones), that court reversed. It held that the judge was not a material witness, because the juror himself was available and was the best source of evidence about his own fitness and conduct, and that the claims turned on the juror's conduct rather than the judge's state of mind. Justice Woodall concurred in the result, noting that a judge who presided at the trial may take notice of his own observations and rulings. The effect was that Graddick remained the judge in the postconviction case.
The outcome of the Rule 32 proceedings was not reported. In July 2020, a WPMI report said his appeal of the conviction had been denied the previous year.
After sentencing Jones was held at Holman prison, near Atmore, where the AP placed him when his direct appeal was decided in 2007. In December 2008, News On 6 described him as a death row inmate. In July 2020, when the Netflix revival of Unsolved Mysteries featured one of the cases linked to him, WPMI reported that he had been on Alabama's death row since his conviction and remained a suspect in killings in several states. No execution date had been set when the 2007 appeal was decided, and none had been reported by July 2020.
The full extent of what Jones said in the Mobile jail became public only after his conviction. During the trial he maintained his innocence in front of his mother and his girlfriend. Privately, the sheriff's investigator Paul Burch said, he had given detectives the names of victims and the places where they were killed. A week after the verdict, in early November 2005, the authorities said he had confessed to at least 12 more killings in four other states. News On 6 in Tulsa reported that he had confessed to at least 13 killings in five states, seven of them in Oklahoma.
As News On 6 listed them, his claims ran in this order: the 1992 stabbing death of Jennifer Judd in Baxter Springs, Kansas; the 1996 shooting deaths of a man and a woman in rural Delaware County, Oklahoma; the 1999 drugging of Justin Hutchings in Picher, Oklahoma; three months later, the killings of Danny and Kathy Freeman in Welch, Oklahoma, and of their daughter Ashley Freeman and her friend Lauria Bible; the 2002 stabbing death of Tina Mayberry in Douglasville, Georgia; and, in 2004, Katherine Collins in New Orleans, Amanda Greenwell in Georgia, Patrice Endres in Georgia a month later, and Lisa Nichols in Alabama a few months after that.
The same report said police were skeptical, because Jones was a known liar, although they said they could prove he had been at each place when the deaths occurred. Attorney General King said Jones could lie without remorse and kill without remorse. Jones refused to admit the killings to his mother, his girlfriend or reporters, but insisted that what he had told the police was true. The Mobile County sheriff, Jack Tillman, said other cases fit his profile, not only in Mobile County but everywhere he had roamed.
Earlier in 2005, acting on his statements, investigators had searched a pond in Chickasaw, Alabama, for the bodies of missing women and searched old mines in Kansas for the two Oklahoma girls. They found nothing. Investigators in California, Arkansas, Tennessee, Florida, Kansas, Missouri and other parts of Alabama also contacted the Mobile County authorities about unsolved killings, according to Alabama prosecutors. A detective said some of the cases appeared to involve women killed in Atlanta. An investigator said during the trial that about 10 other unsolved killings might be linked to him, and that the number could reach 20. In 2020 WPMI reported that Jones had also confessed to several other killings in Mobile County that investigators had never been able to corroborate.
None of these statements led to another conviction.
In December 1999 Danny and Kathy Freeman were found dead in their burned mobile home in Welch, in Craig County, Oklahoma. Their 16-year-old daughter, Ashley Freeman, and her friend Lauria Bible, also 16, have been missing since December 30, 1999. News On 6 reported in 2008 that the girls' bodies had never been found.
In January 2005 officials said Jones had told investigators the girls' remains might be found in the old mining district where Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri meet. By December 2005, the AP reported, the authorities said he had told them he took the girls to rural southeastern Kansas, killed them and left them in an abandoned mine. Searches near Galena, Kansas, in June 2005 found nothing. Before that search, Jones told the Joplin Globe from his cell that he had never killed anyone and that the detectives were wasting their time. The Craig County sheriff, Jimmie Sooter, said in 2008 that Jones had confessed the killings to him.
Records raised doubts about the confession from the start. They showed that early on the morning the Freemans were found, Jones had been arrested in neighboring Ottawa County on complaints of public drunkenness and drug paraphernalia, and he was in a holding cell at the Ottawa County jail in Miami. News On 6 reported in January 2005 that he was arrested about an hour before the medical examiner's estimated time of death for Kathy Freeman, and that the fire at the Freeman home was found a couple of hours after his arrest. Jones was never charged in the Freeman case, and News On 6 noted in December 2008 that he had never been prosecuted for the girls' disappearance.
In July 2020 another man, Ronald Dean Busick, pleaded guilty in Vinita, Oklahoma, to being an accessory to first-degree murder in the case and agreed to help investigators look for the girls' remains, the Joplin Globe reported. That report did not mention Jones.
Jones was named by officials as a suspect in the February 21, 1996, shooting deaths of a man and a woman in rural Delaware County, near Grove. Wire and local reports name the victims as Danny or Daniel Oakley, 38, and Doris Harris, 39 (one AP report gives the man's first name as David). Jones was never charged. In April 2025 the Delaware County district attorney's office closed the case, naming as the suspect another man, who had died in 2006; that announcement, as reported by FOX23 in Tulsa, did not mention Jones.
He was also named in 2007 as a suspect in the 1999 death of Justin Hutchings of Picher, a mining town in Ottawa County; News On 6 reported his claim that he had drugged him. No charge followed.
By May 2006, the Joplin Globe reported, Oklahoma had filed no charges in any of the seven killings he claimed there.
Jennifer Judd was 20 and had been married for about nine days when she was killed in her home in Baxter Springs, Kansas, in 1992. Jones told the Alabama investigator Paul Burch that he had killed her. He claimed that the two had had a secret affair and that she had married another man instead of him, and he said he had stalked her in the days before her death. Burch found him convincing. Her father rejected the claim of an affair, saying she had been committed to her husband for four years, and told the Joplin Globe in 2006 that he did not believe Jones had anything to do with her death; he thought she was more likely killed by someone she knew. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation said then that it did not share Burch's view. Its agent Larry Thomas noted that Jones had recanted some confessions and that other states had disproved some of his claims through forensic evidence. As of 2006 Kansas had not charged him.
In April 2005 Ottawa County, Oklahoma, Sheriff Dennis King called Jones a person of interest in the March 5, 1997, killings of Harmon Fenton and Sarah Palmer, a couple from Commerce, Oklahoma, who were found shot near Melrose, Kansas, just north of the state line. The sheriff said Jones had bought drugs from Fenton while working as a task force informant. No charge was reported.
Tina Mayberry, 38, was stabbed to death in Douglasville on October 31, 2002. Georgia investigators questioned Jones about her death, and in December 2004 Sheriff Phil Miller said he remained a suspect but that there had been no movement in the case.
Patrice Endres, 38, a hairdresser, disappeared from her salon in Cumming, Forsyth County, on April 15, 2004. In 2005 Forsyth County authorities said Jones had given a statement admitting that he had killed her and disposed of her body. No body was found at the time, and no charge was filed. Her husband attended the Alabama trial and said he did not know why the authorities had not charged him. Her remains were found on December 6, 2005, in Dawson County, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. In April 2024, 20 years after she disappeared, the GBI was still asking the public for leads in her death; its appeal named no suspect. The Netflix series Unsolved Mysteries featured her case in 2020, and WPMI reported that Jones had admitted killing her and later taken the confession back.
Amanda Greenwell's case is the only Georgia death in which he was charged. What became of that charge after 2007 was not reported.
Katherine Collins, 45, was found dead in New Orleans in February 2004. Jones had been charged with her murder by May 2005, and in late 2005 he listed her among the people he said he had killed. As with the Georgia charge, no trial has been reported; in August 2007 the AP still described him as charged in her death.
Jones's one proven killing is the murder of Lisa Nichols. For the others, the record shows three kinds of evidence, and they point in different directions.
First, his own statements. He told Alabama investigators of at least a dozen other killings and gave them names and places. He then denied many of them, sometimes publicly; he told the Joplin Globe in 2005 that he had never killed anyone, and during his trial he told the jury that a neighbor of Lisa Nichols, by then dead, was responsible for her death. His defense lawyers argued that he had confessed to obtain food, telephone use and relief from suicide watch, a claim the trial court and the appeals court considered and rejected for the Nichols statements. Neither court ruled on the truth of his other claims.
Second, contradicting records. In the Welch case, jail records place him in custody in Miami early on the morning the Freemans were found. Searches in Chickasaw and in the Kansas mines, based on what he said, found nothing. A Kansas Bureau of Investigation agent said in 2006 that other states had disproved some of his claims forensically. Later developments in two Oklahoma cases, the 2020 accessory plea in the Freeman case and the 2025 closing of the Delaware County case, involved other men.
Third, the charges. Georgia and Louisiana each filed a murder charge, and Georgia prosecutors spoke in 2004 of a major break. Neither case is reported to have gone to trial.
For these reasons the deaths other than Lisa Nichols's remain charges, confessions or attributions, not proven killings.
Lisa Nichols's daughters followed the case from the arraignment to the verdict. After the conviction her daughter said the family had reached its goal and the hard part was over. Her former husband, asked about the fingerprint failures that had let Jones go free in Georgia, said it was a shame but could not be undone.
Relatives of people in the other cases were left with less. Amanda Greenwell's father attended part of the Alabama trial. Patrice Endres's husband attended too, asked why his wife's case had not been charged, and pressed for reform of the FBI fingerprint system. Jennifer Judd's family, interviewed by the Joplin Globe in 2006, asked whether they would ever know who killed her.
1992: Jones faces burglary and theft charges in Missouri. Jennifer Judd is killed in Baxter Springs, Kansas; Jones later claims her death, and Kansas does not charge him.
February 21, 1996: Danny Oakley and Doris Harris are killed in Delaware County, Oklahoma; Jones is later named a suspect but is never charged.
March 5, 1997: Harmon Fenton and Sarah Palmer are found shot near Melrose, Kansas; Jones is later called a person of interest.
March 1997: Jones pleads no contest to charges in Ottawa County, Oklahoma.
1999: Justin Hutchings dies in Picher, Oklahoma; Jones later claims he drugged him.
1999 and 2000: Jones works for a couple in Turnerville, Alabama.
December 1999: Danny and Kathy Freeman are found dead in Welch, Oklahoma; Ashley Freeman and Lauria Bible are missing from December 30. Jones is in custody in Ottawa County that morning.
2000: Jones is wanted in Oklahoma on a sexual assault charge, according to a 2005 AP report.
October 31, 2002: Tina Mayberry is killed in Douglasville, Georgia.
2003 and 2004: Jones is arrested three times in Douglas and Carroll counties, Georgia, under the alias and released; the FBI system does not identify him.
February 2004: Katherine Collins is found dead in New Orleans.
April 2004: Amanda Greenwell's remains are found near Douglasville.
April 15, 2004: Patrice Endres disappears from her salon in Cumming, Georgia.
September 15, 2004: Hurricane Ivan strikes the Mobile area; Jones arrives in Turnerville.
September 17, 2004: Lisa Marie Nichols is killed in her home.
September 21, 2004: Jones is arrested in Mobile County.
December 2004: Jones is charged in Georgia with Amanda Greenwell's murder; on December 10 he admits the Nichols killing in a recorded jail call.
May 2005: Jones is reported as charged in New Orleans with Katherine Collins's murder; the FBI admits its fingerprint errors; a Mobile County grand jury indicts Jones for capital murder; on May 10 he pleads not guilty.
June 2005: a search near Galena, Kansas, for the Welch girls finds nothing.
October 17, 2005: the Alabama trial begins.
October 26, 2005: Jones is convicted of four counts of capital murder.
October 27, 2005: the jury votes 10 to 2 for death.
November 2005: officials disclose his confessions to at least 12 other killings.
December 1, 2005: Judge Charles Graddick sentences Jones to death.
December 6, 2005: Patrice Endres's remains are found in Dawson County, Georgia.
February 2006: a new trial is denied.
August 31, 2007: the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals affirms the conviction and sentence.
June 15, 2011: the Court of Criminal Appeals orders Graddick off the postconviction case.
December 9, 2011: the Alabama Supreme Court reverses that order.
July 2020: Ronald Dean Busick pleads guilty as an accessory in the Freeman case; Unsolved Mysteries features the Endres case; Jones is on Alabama's death row.
April 2024: the GBI renews its appeal for leads in the Endres case.
April 2025: Delaware County closes the Oakley and Harris case, naming another man, now dead, as the suspect.